July build Feedback (~16 hours in)

Overall I love the game so far and look forward to its continued development. Here is my first round of feedback --

“Bolter and Chainsword”:

The pistols, at the very least the bolt pistol, should allow for the "assault gunnery" skill (i.e. run toward enemies while firing) while in the off-hand slot with a 1h melee weapon. Why? Not only is this an iconic-pairing in 40k, but from a gameplay standpoint the player is giving up considerable defense by ditching the shield. This build would be the half-way point between shield/melee and 2h melee – a mobile melee build that could do a constant tick of damage while engaging their enemies. There clearly would need to be some sort of skill synergy to aid this type of build. Two proposals: 1) give the running pistol shots high suppression damage (which I'm assuming would lower incoming damage if you fired into a group) or 2) scoring a kill with the pistol would give you a temporary melee and/or melee ability damage buff that would further incentive you finishing closing the distance.

Flamer Feedback:

Enemies should always turn into their burnt corpse variants when they die to the flamer. Why? We are dousing them with fiery promethium. Currently the feedback from the flamers feel extremely gamey – like they are simply DPS water hoses rather than fiery death dealers. As a bonus, enemies should scream when they are on fire to remove any remaining doubt that they are burning alive and not just getting tickled to death by a DOT.

Enemy Banter:

I saw an excellent post by Emes where he briefly touched on this and I agree 100%. So much so that I'd say this is perhaps the primary flaw in the game's feeling of immersion right now. Enemies need to be vocal and have a variety of barks in broken English. Humanoid enemies should be able to call out when they see the player, chatter mid-fight to give the impression they are working together, yell taunts that may or may not be comprehensible, etc. Chaos creatures should make sounds befitting their appearance. Enemy banter would breathe tremendous life into the feeling that we are battling living enemies.

Music:

So far the music is pretty good, but I really hope that it is elevated to “memorable”. Perhaps the best Warhammer music I’ve heard, while not 40k, is Mordheim: City of the Damned’s. An example song from it is “The Stronghold”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBi9GIEtJgA (stick with it for at least the first minute). Try playing the game with this soundtrack playing in the background. While it isn’t a perfect fit for 40k, and as it was composed for a turn-based game it is very consistently mid-tempo, IMO it carries a weight to it that most game soundtracks lack.

Mini-Map:

Please take a look at the new mini-map in the full release of Path of Exile. Is it incredibly smooth and extremely readable. Probably the best mini-map I’ve ever seen in an ARPG.

Chaos Space Marines:

They should be a much greater threat. Besides the Nurgle Havok (which already are fairly scary in combat), both the ranged and melee CSMs currently feel simply like tanky cultists. I don’t know the exact mix of changes that would work perfectly, but I do believe that they should have far greater agility (i.e. move faster, transition between actions quickly, be able to shoot their bolters on the run while chasing the player, etc.).

Needless Backtracking:

I agree with EMIELREGIS's feedback that the current backtracking is a waste of time. Maps that branch from the center should have some sort of shortcut – whether it’s a 1-way locked door or a teleporter -- at the end of each branch that returns you to the center. The downtime of running a minute or more past empty areas we’ve already cleared breaks the flow of the missions.

I will put this in our feedback section for the devs to see it. My biggest concern right now is the minimap, and we will hopefully construct a better one soon, in a future update. It is really hard to see sometimes right now.

Agree with most part, and wanna added to the first feed back, I think it should also allow the players to custom the skills of the weapon combine, like I always feeling in some situation the last 2 skill of the Bolter Pistol would be more useful than the first 2, u know that rapidly fire default bound on the 2 key on keyboard. And also for non-combi weapon set, some skill would be more useful if the players could move their key from the keyboard to mouse key.

Agreed, the minimap definitley needs some work. As a suggestion, or work around, for backtrack speed - whatabout the use of a personal travel device..ie..jetpacks..not sure how it fits into the 40k universe, but having a travel power to get around the map would be phenomenal. To stop the abuse maybe make it a charged use or on impact (getting fired on and hit), have it be disabled for a period of time. Just some food for thought

Agree with most part, and wanna added to the first feed back, I think it should also allow the players to custom the skills of the weapon combine, like I always feeling in some situation the last 2 skill of the Bolter Pistol would be more useful than the first 2, u know that rapidly fire default bound on the 2 key on keyboard. And also for non-combi weapon set, some skill would be more useful if the players could move their key from the keyboard to mouse key.

I absolutely 100% agree that we need the ability to customize which 2 abilities we bring per gun whenever we are dual-wielding.

Two proposals for weapon skill customization:

1) Bare minimum: give us the ability in our pre-mission loadout to click-toggle any combination of the 2 skills available for each weapon. Perhaps for even greater simplicity of implementation, skill 1 would always be chosen, but we could choose which of the remaining 3 is equipped. (i.e. do I want Aimed Shot, Concussive Shot, or Suppressive Fire -- all tactically different?)

OR

2) Ideal: give us the ability to click on any of the 4 skill slots for a gun and we could choose from a pool of skills that draws from two categories -- A) skills specific to that gun (i.e. Overcharge for the plasma pistol) and B) skills shared between all pistols (i.e. Full Auto). That latter pool I believe should include Assault Gunnery. If the player wants the option to play aggressively as a melee DPS class and shoot while closing the distance, this would essentially unlock any entire subclass.

The best part of adding dual wield skill customization:

It would leverage the already completed work of the developers in the design and implementation of those skills, while greatly expanding the diversity of viable character builds. People would be far more likely to actually use the skills currently hard-locked to 1h weapons equipped by themselves. For a major example, limiting Assault Gunnery to only the autopistol equipped by itself feels like a gigantic missed opportunity.

Lastly, to hit home why this is all so important -- the gun/melee builds are currently broken. Why?

1) The inability to run and gun while closing the distance makes the player have to choose between being either a stationary and mediocre shooter whose sword serves no purpose, or a bum-rushing melee character who can't fire his gun. Rather than the two weapons working synergistically together, they actually work against each other.

2) You lose both the damage bonus and crowd control abilities of a 2h melee weapon and the defense of a shield with no benefit to choosing this trade-off.

3) Using melee + shield as primary loadout with a heavy weapon (ex. Lascannon) as your 2nd loadout vastly outperforms this build in every way.

We could (and should) have a beautiful, balanced spectrum of viable builds, with shield/melee on one extreme, heavy weapons on the other, and melee/gun fitting snuggle in the middle -- all equally viable. I would love to see this become a reality, hopefully others agree!

I will put this in our feedback section for the devs to see it. My biggest concern right now is the minimap, and we will hopefully construct a better one soon, in a future update. It is really hard to see sometimes right now.

Awesome, thank you Megapull!!!

Please see the other reply I just made in this thread to Reptilienskiregarding skill customization for dual wield, I believe you'll appreciate it.